With PPC, you’re not paying for a promise, and you’re not paying to load anad onto a page. You’re paying for an actual result, a click. With PPC, you don’t
pay if nobody sees your ad, and you don’t even pay if someone does see it
but doesn’t click. You pay only when someone clicks your ad. In the business,
people talk about buying clicks because that’s just what they (and you) are
doing. You’re paying a PPC company each time someone clicks a link pointing
to your Web site.
Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say you’re paying for a lead . . . you’re not.
Some PPC companies have taken to referring to each click as a lead, but
that’s just hype. (A lead in sales-talk is someone who has expressed an interest
in your product or service. No sales professional would regard the visitor,
at this click stage, as having expressed enough interest to have risen to the
level of being a sales lead.) Nonetheless, you are paying for a particular
action. Someone sees your ad, clicks the ad, and (in general) views your site.
Certainly, now and then, people won’t arrive at your site — they may click
and then cancel before your page fully loads — but generally speaking, a click
is the same as a visit. It could be a very short visit, true, but it’s something a
bit more tangible than a placement or an impression.
Why isn’t a click the same as a lead? Compare Internet advertising with
direct mail. Imagine, for a moment, a direct-mail campaign that is intended to get
someone to call your company. You mail a letter, someone opens the letter,
reads the letter and, you hope, picks up the phone and calls you. When the
person calls, the person becomes a sales lead. Most people who open the
letter won’t call, though. So you can’t call the letter a lead, and you can’t call
someone opening the letter a lead. Displaying a PPC ad is the equivalent of
sending the letter; and a click on the PPC ad is the equivalent of having someone
open your letter. It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s most certainly
not a lead.
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